Up to 13 million people around the world could be pushed into hunger because of the spike in food prices and disruptions in supplies that result from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization on Wednesday. The global hunger rate of 9.9 percent was already the highest in 13 years, due to the pandemic.
A sudden and prolonged reduction in food exports by either nation “could exert upward pressure on international food commodity prices to the detriment of low-income, food-deficit countries in particular,” said the FAO in a so-called information note.
“Under such a scenario, the global number of undernourished people could increase by 8 to 13 million people in 2022/23, with the most pronounced increases taking place in Asia-Pacific, followed by sub-Saharan Africa and the Near East and North Africa.” The increase would be equal to 2 percent of the people now hungry.
Russia and Ukraine are two of the largest wheat suppliers for the world market. They are also important corn exporters, and Ukraine is the world leader in sunflower oil exports. The world’s other major exporting nations cannot fill the gap in trade for the 2022/23 marketing season, which opens soon. “Worryingly, the resulting global supply gap could push up international food and feed prices by 8 to 22 percent above their already elevated levels,” said the FAO.
About 768 million people — more than the population of Europe — were hungry in 2020, an increase of 118 million people since the arrival of Covid-19, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition 2021, a UN report. More than half of the world’s hungry lived in Asia, and more than one-third were in Africa.
“We on the [House] Agriculture Committee will be out front and doing all we can to make sure that we do not have a hunger crisis,” said chairman David Scott, a Georgia Democrat. Scott invited committee members to join him in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “to bring some additional tools to help address this humanitarian crisis that is now taking place as a result of this terrible, awful Russian invasion.”
The United States is the largest food aid donor in the world.
Because of the war, 20 to 30 percent of Ukrainian land usually devoted to winter grains, corn, and sunflower seed “will either not be planted or remain unharvested during the 2022/23 season, with yields of those crops also likely to be adversely affected,” according to FAO preliminary assessments. The conflict may prevent farmers from harvesting or marketing winter wheat that was planted last fall and due for harvest in late spring or early summer.
“In the case of the Russian Federation, although no major disruption to crops already in the ground appears imminent, uncertainties exist over the impact that the international sanctions imposed on the country will have on food exports,” said the FAO.
Russia and Ukraine have supplied 29 percent of the wheat on the world market in recent years. Their share will drop to 26 percent this marketing year due to the war, the USDA forecast last week. Its estimate of a decline of 7 million tonnes in wheat exports from the nations would be offset in part by a record-setting harvest in Australia and far larger than usual exports from India.
The FAO information note is available here.